Historically, telecom operators have looked to infrastructure
providers, service bureau companies and traditional managed communication
services companies for infrastructure and related services. A recent industry
trend has been to outsource infrastructure as a service as a means of reducing
Capital Expenditure (CapEx) and to use as negotiation leverage for improved
pricing on next generation networks such as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and
LTE infrastructure such as Voice over LTE (VoLTE).

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a telecom led
initiative that aims to utilize standard IT virtualization technology to
consolidate many telco network equipment types onto industry standard high
volume servers, switches and storage. NFV involves implementing network
functions in software that can run on a range of industry standard server
hardware, and that can be moved to, or instantiated in, various locations in
the network as required, without the need to install new proprietary
equipment.